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Published in:
2010 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
Using Entropy for Parameter Analysis of Evolutionary Algorithms
Authors : Selmar K. Smit, Agoston E. Eiben
Published in: Experimental Methods for the Analysis of Optimization Algorithms
Publisher: Springer Berlin Heidelberg
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Evolutionary algorithms (EA) form a rich class of stochastic search methods that share the basic principles of incrementally improving the quality of a set of candidate solutions by means of variation and selection (Eiben and Smith 2003, De Jong 2006). Such variation and selection operators often require parameters to be specified. Finding a good set of parameter values is a nontrivial problem in itself. Furthermore, some EA parameters are more relevant than others in the sense that choosing different values for them affects EA performance more than for the other parameters. In this chapter we explain the notion of entropy and discuss how entropy can disclose important information about EA parameters, in particular, about their relevance. We describe an algorithm that is able to estimate the entropy of EA parameters and we present a case study, based on extensive experimentation, to demonstrate the usefulness of this approach and some interesting insights that are gained.